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Assistive Technology Blog: Accessibility Features on My Computer

I use a computer with Windows 7. There are four assistive technology tools available. There is also an Ease of Access Center that has seven features.

Assistive Technology

Magnifier – Magnifier allows the use to magnify part of the screen. I am familiar with this technology because my wife has vision issues and uses this feature. There are three settings: full screen, lens and docked. Full screen makes the whole screen larger by a chosen percent. Lens places an on-screen magnifying lens that moves with the cursor. Docked splits the screen and has a magnified version at the top.

Narrator – Narrator reads the text on your screen. Another tool for people with vision issues or reading difficulties. As someone who likes to hear the words that I am reading, I thought this would be a helpful tool for me, but I have yet to figure out how to get it to work right. All it will read is the narrator window or the Ease of Access panel. I have never gotten it to work on a word document or a website. In researching on the Internet, it appears this is a common problem that was never fixed by Microsoft. If you need a screen reader, I would suggest finding another one.

On-Screen Keyboard – I have typed this sentence with the on-screen keyboard. If you do not have or can not use a keyboard, it is a helpful tool. However, unless you have a touch screen, it is very time consuming.

High Contrast – This is another tool for people with vision issues. This will heighten the contrast of items on the screen to make them more distinct from others. It changes to white text on a black background, which is handy when working in very bright area (such as outdoors).

Ease of Access Center

The Ease of Access Center allows the user to make adjustments to the computer for the following purposes:

Use the computer without a display

Make the computer easier to see

Use the computer without a mouse or keyboard

Make the mouse easier to use

Make the keyboard easier to use

Use text or visual alternative for sound

Make it easier to focus on tasks –

There are features designed for people who are blind, like text to speech and audio description. I have used text to speech before (because I never learned to touch type) and it is helpful. Speech recognition can also be used to control the computer without a mouse. To use this tool, you need to train your computer to understand your voice. From what I could find, audio description tells what is happening in a video, but only if the video has an audio description track. There are other features to help people who have other vision difficulties like color blindness and farsightedness. They allow you to change the thickness of the focus rectangle and the blinking cursor, turn off unnecessary animations and remove background images. You can also change the cursor’s color and size.

Just as there are accessibility features for those with vision issues, there some for those with hearing impairments. Visual notifications can replace sound and text captions can be displayed for multimedia presentations.

There are functions available for managing your keyboard and mouse or even using your computer without a keyboard and mouse. You can turn on the mouse keypad to control the mouse and manage access to windows, like preventing windows from automatically resizing when moved to the edge of the screen. This is helpful for people who have difficulty using a mouse. Sticky, toggle and filter keys can be activated and you can adjust the keyboard shortcuts to make them easier to use. Sticky keys allow you to assign multiple key controls to just one key. This is would benefit people who may have only one hand available to them. Toggle keys send alerts to notify the user that certain keys were pressed that turned on features that might be unwanted. Filter keys benefit those with unsteady hands by ignoring repetitive keystrokes or ones held down too long.

One thought on “Assistive Technology Blog: Accessibility Features on My Computer”

Thanks for your informative look at accessibility for Windows 7. That’s what I have at home on my laptop and at school. Funny thing, I figured Windows had a screen reader of some sort but I’ve never really heard of anyone using it. Most people I know use web based screen readers. Great blog, Joe!